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Based on interviews and a global survey of 800 cybersecurity professionals from five industry sectors, the report outlines how cybercriminals have the advantage, thanks to the incentives for cybercrime creating a big business in a fluid and dynamic marketplace. Defenders on the other hand, often operate in bureaucratic hierarchies, making them hard-pressed to keep up.

“Transforming isolated technologies into a cohesive security system is without a doubt the most daunting challenge facing practitioners today,” said Chris Young, senior vice president and general manager of Intel Security Group. “The battle against our adversaries cannot be fought alone; it will take people, products, organizations and industries working together to eliminate the fragmentation of security through automation, partnerships and unified architectures.”

“The ‘Cloud First’ strategy is now well and truly ensconced into the architecture of many organizations across the world,” said Raj Samani, EMEA chief technology officer, Intel Security. “The desire to move quickly toward cloud computing appears to be on the agenda for most organizations. This year, the average time before respondents thought their IT budgets would be 80 percent cloud-based was 15 months, indicating that Cloud First for many companies is progressing and remains the objective.”

Today, we are seeing the rise in popularity of the smart home and its connected devices. In fact, Gartner forecasts that “there will be more than 10.5 billion ‘things’ in homes by 2020,”¹ which we believe creates a larger potential risk that the devices and personal data that flow from them can be compromised. While internet-connected devices offer consumers new opportunities, they can also come with some drawbacks and potential risks that can be the detriment of relationships.

The digitization of nearly everything has produced mountains of data. More data than human beings can consume, synthesize and put to use. But, with artificial intelligence technologies (cognitive computing and deep learning, as examples), we’re gaining the ability to more effectively understand, interpret and act on all that information.

“One of the harder problems in the security industry is identifying the malicious actions of code that was designed to behave like legitimate software, with low false positives,” said Vincent Weafer, vice president of Intel Security’s McAfee Labs. “The more authentic a piece of code appears, the more likely it is to be overlooked. Just as 2016 saw more ransomware become sandbox-aware, the need to conceal malicious activity is driving a trend toward ‘Trojanizing’ legitimate applications. Such developments place an ever greater workload on an organization’s SOC – where success requires an ability to quickly detect, hunt down, and eradicate attacks in progress.”